For love of our language and affection for the holy, I darken my countenance with constant study of Torah and starve myself over the words of our sages. These I store up in my belly so that they together will be present to my lips. If the Temple were still standing, I would be up there on the platform among my singing brothers, reciting each day the song that the Levites sang in the Temple. But since the Temple remains destroyed and we have no priests at service or Levites at song, instead I study Torah, the Prophets and the Writings, Mishnah, laws and legends, supplementary treatises and fine points of Torah and the works of the scribes. When I look at their words and see that of all the delights we possessed in ancient times there remains only this memory, my heart fills up with grief. That grief makes my heart tremble, and it is out of that trembling that I write stories, like one exiled from his father’s palace who makes himself a little hut and sits there telling of the glory of his father’s house.
Positioning himself as one who writes in the aftermath of destruction, Agnon subordinates himself to the priestly poets who are his predecessors and effaces his own individuality. Paradoxically, the effect of this denigration is to secure for the writer an affiliation to tradition: we have here a mythic portrayal of the writer as one who longs for return and restoration. What disappears from this picture is, of course, his more worldly or modernist face.
In the study of his house in Talpiyot, just outside of Jerusalem, Agnon preferred to write while standing at a lectern, a relic of an eastern European talmudic academy. He was fond of gesturing to the scores of volumes of Jewish learning to be found on the shelves lining the walls, noting in passing the presence of a modest shelf of twentieth-century literary works. This arrangement of books suggests an architecture of the imagination in which secular influences play a distinctly minor role. Indeed we might compare this denial of his own modernism to Agnon’s public comments after accepting the Nobel Prize: he acknowledges sacred texts as the sources of his inspiration and disavows the influence of writers whose names he claims never to have heard. In both instances, we see the persona of the writer at play. Agnon, whose works display a range of literary experimentation that links him to the major modernists of our century, chose to minimize that affiliation and to present instead the image of the writer who subordinates himself to traditional texts. In so doing, he sought to fit his public image to a simpler notion of membership in a community unified by its history.
That mask was also real. Agnon devoted a large portion of his energies to insuring the survival of cultural documents of European communities that were ultimately destroyed. Indeed, even before the threat of the destruction of European Jewry became apparent, Agnon had come to play a major role as a collector of Jewish books and manuscripts and compiled several anthologies of Jewish lore. He was an important figure in Mekitze Nirdamim (Those Who Awaken the Sleeping), a group devoted to the retrieval, preservation, and dissemination of old Jewish manuscripts.
Introduction
The cultural influences and traditions into which the writer was born all eventually found their way into an art that is encyclopedic in its references to Jewish life and texts.[2] Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes, son of Shalom Mordecai ha-Levi Czaczkes and his wife, Esther Farb, was born in 1888 in Buczacz, a town of some 12,000 inhabitants located in eastern Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Family lineage and traditions on both sides exposed him to a variety of currents in nineteenth-century Jewish life. From his mother’s side, Agnon inherited ties to the Mitnagdim, the rationalist opponents of Hasidism, while his father’s lineage included hasidic connections. Thus within his family he experienced the major currents of life in eastern Europe, from the joyous pietism of hasidic traditions to the rigorous intellectual commitments of the rationalists. With his father, who traded in furs, the boy Shmuel Yosef frequented a kloyz, a hasidic house of prayer, that belonged to followers of the Chortkover rebbe, the leader of a sizable community of Hasidim. It was also through his father that he first studied rabbinic texts.
By his own description, Agnon received a traditional education, studying in the traditional one-room Jewish school, the heder, then privately with a teacher and with his father, learning Bible, Talmud, and literature of the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment). The family library was stocked not only with the Talmud and its commentaries but also with the works of Maimonides and the Galician maskilim, the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century proponents of Jewish enlightenment. It was in this library and other local collections that as an adolescent Agnon freely educated himself. The comfortable circumstances of his family allowed him the leisure to do so. But the absence of more formal schooling was in fact a general trait of Galician-Jewish culture.
In a somewhat nontraditional departure, Agnon studied German with a tutor and gained access to European literature in German translation. Thus we see that a certain sophistication attaches to the young writer’s early education. Nevertheless, his reminiscences tend to dwell on the traditions of Jewish learning in the town of Buczacz, traditions that he associates, most particularly, with his father. Marking an idealization of the father that recurs through his work, the son, in later years, painted a portrait of his father as a figure of radiant piety: “My father, my teacher, Rabbi Shalom Mordecai son of Zvi Aryeh ha-Levi, was a man of wondrous learning. Expert he was in the Mishnah and in early and late commentators. And as learned as he was in the Mishnah and its commentaries, so too was he expert in secular learning…. I was not worthy of acquiring even the slightest bit of his knowledge [Torah] or of his qualities. But he taught me love of Torah and of those who study it.” [3] In a portrait that is already embellished with the touch of myth, the son underscores his own deficiencies through comparison with a father whose learning participates in the plenitude of the Torah.
This juxtaposition of son to father, lack to wholeness, present to past, enters into the writer’s depiction of his birthplace, the town that he left as a young man. Destroyed in the Holocaust, the town of Buczacz retains in his imagination the accumulated richness of centuries of Jewish life in eastern Europe. Sefer Buczacz (The Book of Buczacz) is the memorial book of the town to which Agnon contributed. It belongs to a genre that was created in response to the Holocaust by the surviving members of communities that were obliterated. Along with histories, photographs, anecdotal memorabilia, The Book of Buczacz sketches a portrait of the writer as a young boy of twelve, cataloguing the books on the shelves of the town’s house of study, its Beit Midrash. The Beit Midrash functioned as a center for the study of classical Jewish texts and thus can be understood as a central structure in the maintenance of Jewish life.
Introduction
Sefer Buczacz incorporates its native son into the town’s tradition of study and commentary: “Wondrous was that old Beit Midrash — it was not just any Beit Midrash, but the capital of the Mitnagdim, a center for those antagonists of Kabbalah and Hasidism…. In this Beit Midrash Sh. Y. Agnon spent his time and nourished his spirit. Until the destruction his notes and comments could be found in the margins of pages of the books that he studied.”[4] In this scene, the youthful figure of the writer-to-be takes an active role in continuing the traditions of study and commentary that distinguished the town, an enterprise of learning that found its physical and spiritual center in the Beit Midrash.
Compiled after the destruction, Sefer Buczacz is unambivalent in its attention to the history, the setting, and the lives of the inhabitants of Buczacz. By contrast, Agnon’s maturation as a writer undoubtedly involved a resolution of his relationship to traditional Jewish texts and the communal structures that house them. That resolution produced an ironic stance, where the writing constantly plays out themes of rebellion and reconciliation. The disjunctions in Agnon’s art are all the more sharply felt in light of the traditions that the writer draws upon so eloquently. Nowhere can this be better seen than in the quasi-autobiographical A Guest for the Night. This novel takes note of the writer’s youthful rebellion as its first-person narrator describes his early preference for writing poetry rather than studying traditional texts in the Beit Midrash. That bit of personal history is then integrated into the narrator’s account of his return for a yearlong stay during which he devotes himself to efforts to revive the dying town and to undo his own early rebellion through a newfound dedication to the study of old texts.